


The City Upon the Hill

by sessile



Series: Variations [1]
Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF
Genre: Drama, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:29:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24282124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sessile/pseuds/sessile
Summary: He doesn’t think he could bear another ending.
Relationships: Elizabeth Chambers/Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet/Armie Hammer
Series: Variations [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1787182
Comments: 8
Kudos: 48





	The City Upon the Hill

_“Don’t forget to grab some off the tree.” He doesn’t. He grabs a few, presses one fruit to his lips. Timmy greets him with a small, genuine smile and he can’t—_

Armie opens his eyes.

It’s gone. He tries to chase the tail end of the dream through the haze in his mind, and he can only see it go. 

-

He’s not looking forward to this. He’s said, for years, how much he can’t wait to go back, to finish the story, to be understood and wanted and loved once again. 

He doesn’t think he could bear another ending, though. 

-

Timmy’s smile is bright, wide, unabashed. When they embrace, Armie has a wild thought of lifting him off the ground and whirling them both, like in the movies, but they aren’t in a movie and what looks so joyous and free on screen — well. Reality isn’t as simple, and pure. So he simply gives a brotherly clap and they’re swept into their film family that’s gathered. Armie instinctually grabs Tim by the waist to pull him down to sit with him on the couch, and no one notices.

-

Tim barely has the time to get the words “let’s rehearse” out of his mouth when they’re alone in Armie's rented room when he's pulling Timmy hard to him and kissing him like the ship is going down. Timmy is right there with him, arms wending around his neck like they’ve always done, and Armie is backing them up squarely to the bed. 

-

Timmy looks up at him in awe when it’s all over.

-

It takes so much time to slow the racing beat of his heart. 

-

Shooting goes along magically for the first few days. Armie is eager to relive it all again, to have Luca scrutinize him and tell him where he’s lacking and where he’s shining. He’s eager for Timmy’s open face; everything he says is like lobbing a ball into a court of Timmy’s mind and Armie throws things out there just to watch it bounce around. 

Timmy continues to surprise him. Timmy had to spend a quarter-life crisis in the midst of a fucking pandemic; it’s only made him sharper, more sensitive. Armie was still flailing at 25, trying to build a family and career and secretly worried he was fucking up both. Timmy looks at him and Armie can barely remember what the hell was he so afraid of, in everything, in life, in the first place. 

-

He’s older now, he knows he’s like a Great Dane, aging rapidly because people weren’t meant to be 6’5” of limbs and nerves, but with Timmy—he wants to make an exception. He _can’t_ , he thinks a little ruefully at Timmy’s heaving chest and wanting. He won’t be ready again by morning, or even most of the day. He has to wait for nightfall again before he can cover Timmy’s body with his own and memorize the parts of him his mind won’t remember but his body always will. 

-

Liz had watched him go about preparing for this with a mixture of wariness, sympathy, and support. 

She’d once told him about her Elio summer — one of the girls from college, spent wilding around St. Croix and feeling untouchable. That girl, whom she'd also loved with her whole heart, went away, too, and once in a while her mind drifts back, too. Go, she says. Don’t be afraid, she says. We’ll be here when you get back, she says.

He regrets less these days, but he’ll always regret not being able to live more than one life than just this.

-

“Find me,” Timmy urges, breathless, as Armie moves above him. The words are a jolt, and he almost stops, and Timmy turns his wide eyes to him and says somewhere deep in his throat, _“Oliver. Find me.”_

“I’m here,” Armie gasps, seizing Timmy’s adored face in both his hands. “I’m here, I didn’t leave. I’m here.” 

-

It’s a tiny little notification that pops up his phone because he doesn’t fix the settings and usually it’s random news bits, but this time, of course while they’re here in Crema, he sees his own fucking name and he assumes they can’t be saying anything good. 

He’s done nothing. He hasn’t done enough. He’d quelled his ambitions long ago, when the reality of the work hit him, but in his heart of hearts he still wants his touchstone movie, the one he can return to, again and again, for the next thirty years. See it reflected in the face of others and know it's kept in their hearts like others were kept in his.

The first one, with Elio, wasn’t it. It was too private; he, despite everything, was still too nervy. Armie saw himself, on the verge of something, but too like Oliver in being willing to let it slip away. Too like Oliver in thinking he could do without. Too like Oliver in letting everything of this world overwhelm him, telling him that _he_ had no place in this reality.

-

He talks to Peter one day, asks him how he can have his hand in all these works over the years and have the important ones lost to time. 

Peter laughs, laughs heartily in his face about it. 

“Armie, they’re not _lost_. People find them. You never know who, you don’t know when, but c’mon — you _know_. You know these pieces that hardly anyone else knows but mean the entire world to you. They all mean something to me — yes, even the shitty ones. But I know, somehow, they can mean something to someone else.” 

-

Armie can’t help it. He stares at the side of Timmy’s incandescent face as he describes the thrill of doing his own wild stunts for the first time and wonders, _do I mean something to you_. 

-

“ _What is your fucking problem?_ ”

Armie’s head feels like it’s underwater, swaddled in cloth. He doesn’t know how they got here, both their bloods up and faces red at each other. 

Timmy, glued to his phone while Armie is trying to explain something to him. Timmy, flirting with one of the girls in craft services. Timmy, full-on questioning him on the way Oliver is looking at him, speaking to him. Timmy, looking away, walking away. 

“My _fucking_ problem is _you—_ ” Armie watches it leave his mouth before he even knew it was gone. 

And like everything, Armie watches it bounce around in his head, and then he watches Timmy shut down on him. 

_No—_

Tim scoffs, starts to speak, but walks off, slamming the door behind him. 

Armie starts coughing in his wake, his throat like he swallowed shards of glass. He scrabbles at his neck. He can’t breathe. 

-

Luca notices it the instant they all walk on set, but he pulls Timmy aside before even speaking to Armie. Armie almost follows, he can’t bear to be left out of this too, but he’s too fucking old and he knows, now, not everything is meant for him. 

-

Luca calls the rest of the day off, citing Timmy needing a rest. Says they’ll start fresh tomorrow. Says to Armie, sotto voce, _you need to stop doing this to yourself._ Luca looks at him and Armie almost wants to weep, to spill all his fears to him right then and there. Beg him to tell Armie he’s not a failure. That everything he saw over ten years ago was the same, that his instincts about Armie were right, to tell him, _everything will be okay_. 

Armie feels a thousand years old. He nods. He walks off to find a way. 

-

“What will you do when you’re back in New York?” Armie is leaning on the desk, a million miles away from Timmy, who is on the opposite side of the room, fiddling with the pilling fabric on the couch’s upholstery. 

“Find something to do on Broadway. They’re thinking about staging a revival of 'The Coast of Utopia'—” 

“I'd wanted to see that—”

“—I wish it’d came out when I was 15. But being in it is the next best thing.” Said with soft irony, but to the couch. 

Timmy, quiet, is a Michelangelo. Timmy, quiet, feels so wrong in his chest it hurts. 

How does he explain what it’s like getting older, _feeling_ old. Each new year brings a new fear, a new milestone he’d failed to reach. No real award. No meeting with the ones he'd looked up to, all his life. No production team assembled. No legacy. 

This, only a month stolen out of nearly ten years. 

Watching Timmy get older and not getting to be there to see it. 

He misses him every single fucking day. 

“I miss you every single fucking day,” he says, so quiet he’s not even sure he said it. 

It’s like he’d lobbed a brick into Timmy’s mind. Tim stares at him like a fawn in headlights. 

“What are you asking of me?” It’s said high, reedy. This is probably the first time he’s seen Tim like this. Armie feels like he’s treading water to keep from drowning. 

“Nothing, I’m asking nothing.” 

“Why the fuck— _what am I supposed to do with that?_ ” 

Timmy, caught out. Timmy, dismayed and confused. He’d might have seen this on the screen, but Armie can barely look at it in real life. Tim swipes twice at his face and distantly Armie envies again how easily Tim shows his actual emotions, no fear whatsoever. 

“Armie— _what do you want me to do?_ ” 

“I…” He has to clear his throat. _Come home with me. Run away with me. Say we’ll buy this fucking villa, together. Say that every day will be like that fucking summer. Say that you’ll always be 20 and I’ll always be 29 and there’s not a goddamn thing to be afraid of._

“Armie. Armie.” 

He looks at Tim to see that he’d gotten up from the couch and was coming up to him, face beseeching him to have an answer. Timmy’s hands reach out and touch him shakily on the chest. He hears Tim say his name again, feels his fingers ghosting at his neck. 

“Armie.”

He can’t help it: he cradles Tim’s face in his hands like he always does, swipes a thumb across his parted mouth, and kisses him filthy and deep. 

-

He is so fucking loud as he fucks into Tim, drowning out Timmy, the world, his mind. 

-

Timmy flies back home for the weekend. A deluge of shame threatens to carry off Armie into the narrows, and he scrabbles to remember something a therapist told him long ago: _not everything is about you, even when it is about you._ He doesn’t know what he’s doing, Timmy doesn’t know what he’s doing — even Luca doesn’t know what he’s doing and sometimes it’s what creates these brilliant, shining moments that are Armie’s lodestars, to return to and hold, again and again. 

Things work out. Things have a purpose. Certain bad shit had to happen so he could have the courage to turn his back on his family’s beliefs, to go to Elizabeth when everyone else said not to, to hear what Luca was saying when he said a part of Oliver was with him, that all he had to do was be honest and he’d give a performance of a lifetime. 

Be honest, and the rest didn’t matter. _When people are honest with themselves,_ Luca had told him, _it transforms them. I’ve seen it happen, many times. The colors fill in. The soul begins to breathe, for the first time. They lose the ability to lie to themselves anymore and they don’t understand why they did in the first place. I promise you this, Armand._

He’d flinched at the use of his real name, he hadn’t heard it since he was a child. He knew, though, Luca didn’t use it to remind him of his lineage, the legacy of Armand Hammers that came before. Luca used it because it was his name, and only his. 

-

Timmy comes back and doesn’t quite look at him, and Armie knows he has to ask him. 

“Tim, what do you want? From me?”

Armie watches as Tim hears him and automatically tries to speak, but can't before the ball has finished pinging around his head.

Then: clarity in his eyes, and looking straight at him, “I don’t know.” 

Armie lifts his chin, straightens. Tries to breathe. _Okay. That was the answer_. He'd said what he needed to say and it—

“Armie. I don’t know what I want. Out of anything.” He can hear how thick Timmy’s voice has suddenly gotten, see how red his eyes and nose have become, but his gaze is unflinching. “I want to do art and then _I don’t know_. How can you ask me if I know? Did _you_ know? Why—” 

That’s one thing Timmy doesn’t actually share with Elio. Elio could be in the moment, respond with his whole heart. Timmy always has an eye toward the horizon, and he wants to try everything to see what sticks.

This isn’t trying. It’s doing. 

“What will you do, when I leave? I know what I’ll do when you’re gone, same thing I’ve been doing: find you. Facetime you so I can pretend you’re in the room with me but you’re not. Send you links, memes, bullshit over text. See every new thing you come out with so I can fucking go, ‘Ah. I remember that expression. I remember what we were doing when I saw it. I wonder if I’ll get to see it again, from you, to me.’”

Timmy is stock still. He is so drawn and so slight, how did this universe see fit to make him one of the most important—

 _“I_ _can't_.” Barely whispered.

Armie stares at him, breath caught.

When Timmy doesn’t finish, he has to ask:

“You can’t _what?_ ” 

“I _can't,_ I… I’ve never thought of any sort of life without you in it. I always think… that you’ll be there. I think you’ll be at opening night at whatever play I can get, I think you’ll be there when I bomb some fucking movie and I think I’ll never work again, I think you’ll be there when—when my parents fucking die and my only family is Pauline, I—” A sob wracks through him but he doesn’t break eye contact. “Don’t fucking make me do this, Armie. Don’t make me think of a life without you—”

Tim can't speak anymore, and his face completely crumples.

Armie’s head is white noise. He barely registers himself walking across the room, lifting Timmy bodily up in his arms, and laying them both on the bed. He covers Timmy’s body with his own and Timmy chokes out sobs into his chest. He is kissing any part of Timmy’s face that isn’t covered by Tim's hands and whispering, “ _I’m not. I’m not._ ” He kisses the corner of Timmy's grimacing mouth. 

He lays over Timmy and says his name over and over again. 

-

They fall asleep together in their clothes, over the bedspread, and when he wakes the next day, Armie feels like he awoke into a free fall. Timmy’s soft breathing is the only thing that grounds him and Armie looks over his smooth face, and he knows it’s not something he has to say good-bye to. Not now. Not anytime soon.

It scares the shit out of him. It will always leave room for something to break.

But Luca was right. And he can breathe. 

-

Elizabeth tells him, much later, what happened to her Elio. 

“She passed away.” Armie remembers her mouth tightening. “Breast cancer. She was 25.”

Rarely did her voice turn to steel but he’d heard it then:

“Life’s too fucking short, Armie. Too short for questions.” 

She had turned and looked unwaveringly at him.

“Answer them.” 

_fin_


End file.
